> For example; we are planning a University-wide eprints archive. I am
> concerned that some physisists will want to place their items in both
> the university eprints service AND the arXiv physics archive. They may
> be required to use the university service, but want to use arXiv as it
> is the primary source for their discipline. This is a duplication of
> effort and a potential irritation.

Faculty should be given the choice. They should not be required
to do either one. arXiv have been doing a tremendous job at
archiving. You are not going to replace them. But arXiv really
only covers a small set of disciplines well.

> Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that diciplinary archives will be replaced
> with subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting from the institutional
> archives.

I would put this in different way, I'd say that there should be more
interoperability between institutional archives and disciplinary
aggregators. Such aggregators don't have a prime function of
archiving contents but to put the archival contents into
relations with personal and institutional data and
document-to-document metadata such as citations. Rather
than marking up the documents content in the institutional
archive with subject classification data, it should be marked
up with aggregator data. That is, for example, you may decide
to export all the computer science papers to rclis. Thus
you create an rclis set within and inform rclis of this. Then
they can periodically harvest the data and feed it. In the
longer run, we need an extension to the OAI protocol to support
this on a larger scale. In the meantime, it is perfectly feasible
to do this here and now with the model aggregator service that
it out there, the RePEc project. In fact, RePEc does this already
with the California Digital library, thanks to efforts by
Roy Tennant and Christopher F. Baum. So, to all those institutional
archivers out there, if you have an economics department that does
not already operate a RePEc archive, talk to them, talk to RePEc,
and set up a OAI set with the Economics papers. It is better,
within an institution, to proceed department by department and
listen to what the academics want (and these wants will be
different in each department), rather than setting up one
archive that is supposed to satisfy everybody's needs at the
risk of satisfying nobody's.

> What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing
> over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated process
> for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive, or at least
> assisting the author in the process.

It not a pressing concern as much as this appears, because
discipline-based archives have, arXiv apart, not that much stuff.
Discipline aggregators, RePEc apart, are still in their infancy.
I am involved with others in setting up rclis, an aggregator
for computing and library and information science. One thing
should be clear: aggregator need years to develop and lots
of TLC to sustain themselves.

But I repeat: it is best to listen to academics to tell you
what their needs are, rather than setting up procedures around
a central institutional archive, The latter is what Clifford Lynch wants.
I don't think that it will work.